IRE and Esri have partnered to offer 10 fellowships to attend mapping training at the 2013 Esri International Users Conference from July 6-10 in San Diego and 3 fellowships to the IRE Mapping Boot Camp from August 9-11 at the University of Missouri-Columbia, Mo.

The users conference fellowships cover airfare and four nights lodging, and the boot camp fellowships cover airfare and three nights lodging. The users conference schedule includes attendance at the following events: Esri Business Summit (July 7) to learn about how international businesses are using advance mapping technology, Conference Plenary Session (July 8); and Media Workshops and ...

Need a vacation but can’t imagine the outer darkness that is you without your work? Why not take it with you to exotic northern Europe.

In “Data Journalism Around the Globe” panelists trotted out some of the best  data projects coming from our cousins on the continent in the German, Danish and Scandinavian press.

Many of the notables included crowdsourced projects like a Finnish mapping of places where people felt unsafe. Sebastian Mondial demoed Frag den Staat, a Teutonic forebear to FOIA Machine, which helps journalists and citizens query government agencies and track results of information requests. Another project ...

Those interested in taking the mapping classes (to qualify for the Esri ArcView software) at the 2013 CAR Conference must show up for the Friday morning session beginning at 7:30 a.m. at the Keeneland room. Slots in the class will be distributed until they are gone. If more than 24 people want to take the course, additional slots will be handed out for the Sunday morning sessions at that time. If 24 or fewer people show up on Thursday, there will not be a Sunday class. (Sunday sessions would begin at 9 a.m. and end by 11 ...

In December, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch released Death on the Rails, a special report on the surprising number of pedestrian deaths that have occurred on railways.  Reporter Todd Frankel explains how he cross-referenced databases and resources to build his own map of the accidents, which he used to further investigate ”hot spots” of pedestrian death and injury.

You began investigating for the series after a pedestrian fatality in June.  What inspired you to look into these rail-related accidents?  Did you expect to discover so many when ...

For those of you interested in getting started with mapping, we have great news: Esri is offering a free license to ArcGIS Desktop, a $1,500 value, for Louisville Conference attendees who attend the following four conference sessions:

Google Crisis Response created this interactive map showing weather, emergency shelters and power authorities.
 

As the East cost braced for Hurricane Sandy, data journalists across the country were working in realtime to spread the news. We gathered some of the interesting interactive coverage and data visualizations we found from around the web. Have a suggestion for our list? Send it to tony@ire.org or tweet us @IRE_NICAR.

• Timothy Barmann of the Providence Journal put together these maps and graphics tracking power outages in Rhode Island.
• Simon Rogers and John Burn-Murdoch created this interactive for The Guardian Data Blog showing ...

In August, reporter Kate Martin of the Skagit Valley Herald analyzed salary data for mayors across Washington state and ended up with a story about mayors from small towns in her coverage area -- Mount Vernon and Anacortes -- who had salaries on par with mayors from cities several times larger. In reporting the story, Martin first had to gather the data and then reconcile it with the realities of small-town civic duties.

The idea for the story arose through her typical reporting practices: each year, she requests salary data for all of the agencies that the Skagit Valley Herald covers.

“I ...

On the way back to the airport after a grueling week at the the IRE and NICAR Computer-Assisted Reporting boot camp last year, I spotted a dead deer. Anyone who has been to the boot camp or even a NICAR or IRE conference knows that your head is swimming with ideas and possibilities. After a week of boot camp I was seeing spreadsheets and SQL code in my sleep. I wondered who, if anyone, tracked roadkill.

When I returned home, I did a pointed web search for information about roadkill records in Washington state. One of my first hits was ...

Many investigative reporters are recreational data users, but data alone cannot be trusted.

"You can’t take what is in those databases for granted," said Kate Golden, a reporter and multimedia producer for WisconsinWatch.org. At the panel "Environmental analyses for any newsroom," she emphasized the importance of speaking with the lead agency to find out what the data actually means.

During the panel, Elizabeth Lucas a data reporter for The Center for Public Integrity and Golden highlighted a variety of investigative environmental stories such as "Despite lone inspector’s efforts, persistent haze envelops Iowa town" and "Under legal pressure ...

Patrick Sweet, a CAR reporter at the The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., and formerly at The Citizens' Voice, shared some of his favorit sessions from the conference on his blog. Here are his thoughts on NewsCamp: Investigating text in the wild and Locating the story: The latest in mapping as well as other panels. His thoughts:

NewsCamp: Investigating text in the wild

 I was super excited for this panel. Picture having to analyze hundreds of government documents. And, we’re not talking about a tab-delimited table; just raw text.

Sarah Cohen from Duke University walked through some fantastic examples ...